HTML5 getting closer: Over at the W3C the HTML5 spec has got close with the publication of the Proposed Recommendation of HTML5. By the end of the year, HTML5 will, according to the activity statement and barring madness, be a W3C recommendation. Then it’ll be onto the HTML 5.1 track as it sees a Candidate Recommendation out at in early 2015 and wrapping up in a recommendation at the end of 2016.

Rust 1.0 nears too: Mozilla’s Rust language is about to head into the final straight as plans are laid out for 1.0. Expect a beta 1.0 by year end and a release after that. There’s been a lot of simplification of the language over the last year, but there’s still quite a list of things to integrate before that beta lands, like dynamically sized types, a new closure design, associated types, where clauses and more. Unless you’re a language fan wanting to watch a language evolve, Rust has been interesting by not one for adoption – when 1.0 arrives, we’ll be able to see how it performs and what it finally offers.

Min! Min!: The Min framework is tiny, like 955 bytes of CSS tiny (minified and gzipped), but with lots of HTML5 semantic elements used, no JavaScript needed and a lot of capabilities. With an extra 3.5K plugin, the authors claim full feature parity with Bootstrap, less the Bootstrap look. And all under an MIT licence. Tasty.

Playgrounds examined: Apple’s Xcode Playgrounds are an interesting development for developers in that they are super-interactive environments for trying out code. The folks over at Big Nerd Ranch had a look inside a .playground file (it’s a directory really) to see how the Swift environment is built and looks at how to turn them into a presentation tool for code teaching.